by S P Somtow
“But why are we here, where is this?” asked Halliday. “This is a seascape that almost looks like Thanet—but not quite. The sun is wrong, the texture of the sea is subtly different.”
[113] “Quite so, Dr. Halliday,” Data said. “We’re not on Thanet at all. Thanet is not the Thanetians’ native planet.”
Together, Data and the others began to experience history—a colorful history, a history of trauma and bloodshed—a history that was nothing like the so-called ancient wisdom the Thanetians had received from their sacred texts..
Chapter Fourteen
The Comet’s Heart
DEANNA TROI felt the momentary disjuncture of the transporter. In an instant, she materialized inside the comet. She was dizzy. It was the gravity. The corridor she was in corkscrewed up and around and over and the center of gravity didn’t seem to be in one place. And then there was the tide of infantile desolation, sweeping over her, threatening to engulf her, drown her—her stomach turned. She reached out for anything, anyone-—
And Riker was there, holding her for a moment. She looked into his eyes. Saw the calm center of him, knew that deep within him was the ghost of an old love; she felt it and was comforted. “I’m here, Deanna,” he said softly.
The air was thin here, but breathable; the O2 level [115] at least seemed tolerable. But the anxiety level was almost unmanageable. Pinpricks of fear and desolation bombarded her. Slowly she got a grip on herself, steadied herself. All in a day’s work for an empath, she told herself wryly. If only people knew how much it takes out of you, keeping yourself open like this.
A dim, sourceless light permeated the passageway. It had a bluish tinge; there was a coldness to it; Deanna shuddered.
“Well,” Riker said, “this is artificial all right.” He peered around. The walls at first seemed featureless, but as their eyes grew used to the light, she started to see patterns—lines etched into the metallic surface—ancient circuits, perhaps. This was no ordinary passageway. They were inside a machine of some kind, one sophisticated enough to have targeted Thanet—a weapon.
“We’re inside,” Riker communicated to the bridge.
“Listen,” Deanna said.
At first it was a low moaning, almost at the threshold of hearing.
“But there’s no wind here,” Riker said.
“You sense it,” said Deanna. “You, too, Will. So it’s more than just an empathie vibration in the air.”
The moaning increased in volume. It tugged at her very heartstrings. Within the windlike sighing there was a human voice—the cry of a child. “This comet is alive,” she said softly. “More than that—it’s sentient.”
[116] The sighing crescendoed. Within the windlike wuthering, a child’s voice was now clearly audible. Deanna felt a vibration within her soul—that sense of loss-without-hope-of-retrieval, as though she had lost an entire race, an entire species, as though she were the last survivor of some planet-smashing holocaust. She knew of only a few beings who lived surrounded by such an aura. She had felt it with Guinan sometimes, had wondered how a person could carry such a weight within themselves and still be so much at peace.
“I guess we should just follow the voice,” said Riker.
“Yes.”
There was a sensation of falling. The voice was definitely down; it came from below, from a place that humans thought of as the abyss—inferno—hell.
Around her, so vivid-she could not distinguish reality from illusion, image upon image now—an ocean of fire—screams of dying—cities aflame—a child fleeing through the labyrinthine passageways of a doomed city—columns of a great temple snapping like twigs, roofs caving in, warriors sliced in two by great swaths of laser death. The tunnel became more twisted now, spiraling. They passed through tiny cells like the chambers inside a conch shell.
At length they came to an inner chamber. A womb, Deanna thought. It was so narrow that she and Riker could barely squeeze inside. And inside the womb—a child—a boy, Deanna realized, not [117] quite at the age of puberty—a boy who was much too far from home.
Gravity righted itself here, and they found themselves standing before the child as though before an altar. Naked, he floated in a pod of some transparent material, a nutrient fluid bathing him; his eyes were open, but unaware, as though in an unnatural sleep. There were metal tendrils weaving about his feet and hands, and a dozen cyborg connectors sprouted from his shaved head.
His fingers were webbed—this boy was clearly of the same species as the Thanetians. Yet how many parsecs had this comet traversed? There was a mystery here, and Deanna realized that the only way to bring a true resolution to the Thanetians’ dilemma was to find the answers.
If only the boy could speak.
And then he did speak, in a way.
You are the one who is not my mother—yet stands in her place, he said.
His lips did not move, but she clearly heard the voice in her mind. Startled, she looked at Riker. He too seemed puzzled.
“I heard a voice,” Deanna said.
“And I felt—something,” Riker said. “If even I can feel it, I can imagine how it must be affecting you.”
Who are you? Deanna called out in her mind.
I am the thanopstru, the voice whispered. She knew the word. It was a Thanetian word, and it meant bringer of death. It was the name, in the [118] Sacred Panvivlion, of the destroyer that would come at the end of time.
But this instrument of divine vengeance was supposed to be some terrible force of nature, surely—not a terrified little boy.
Help me, help me, oh help me.
And then, as Deanna gazed on the child’s face, feeling his immeasurable torment, she saw a single tear form in his right eye—and slide down his cheek before dissolving into the nutrients that bathed him.
“Of course I will,” Deanna whispered. “Of course.” She backed up the words with a powerful current of goodwill and affection, drawing on feelings she had known as a child—warmth, love, the protecting arms of a loving parent.
Don’t, said the voice within. No, no, don’t tell me those things—they contradict—the program—they violate—the conditioning—they—And then, a deeper voice, rhythmic, terrifying: Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill!
Part Three: The Mortal That Was a Machine
There shall come in the last days of the world a Thanopstru, that is to say, a Bringer of Death. And this shall be his sign. He shall shine in the night sky like a sun, yet be tailed like a meteor. Brighter than the dancing moons shall he shine, and the last days will be rich with the rushing of dailong in the seas, and joyous with dancing. Be of good cheer. Ye are doubly blessed, who live in the days of the Thanopstru.
And in moments of terror or hardship, ye shall recite over and over the holy name of the Thanopstru, and from the certain knowledge of the coming cataclysm, you shall draw comfort, you shall find stillness without your troubled hearts.
—From the Holy Panvivlion
ONCE MORE, CAPTAIN PICARD was poring through those field notes, trying to glean some bit of information they could fix on, something to explain the mysteries of Thanet.
And once more, the problems seemed to get more and more convoluted, the more one delved into them.
He looked up: he found himself face-to-face with Guinan. Somehow, she had known he needed to speak with her.
He said, “Look, it’s easy to say, don’t touch their belief system, don’t upset their civilization. But then, I start thinking.
“If a man is dying of an incurable, painful disease—if he’s suffering, if science cannot help—and he decides to pull his own plug—that’s one [124] ethical dilemma. But if he’s in the prime of life, if he has nothing holding him back except an illusion—if he has so much left to give to the rest of the world, so much potential, so much art and literature, so much beauty—is it right to strip away that illusion?”
“Your call, Captain,” Guinan said softly.
“I know it is,” Picard said, and turned back to Halli
day’s field notes, feeling once again—
“The aloneness,” Guinan sighed. “Yes, I know.”
CONFIDENTIAL REPORT:
Dr. Robert Halliday’s field notes
The transcript continues:
Last week, I went to a thanhalyrion, which is a sort of wake for the end of the world. There was more singing and dancing than you can imagine, and what amazed me was that, within the rigidity of their class structure, there seemed to be more than a little fluidity. There was an intoxicating liquid called peftifesht wine, which made everyone very merry but seemed to have the side effect of relaxing the caste system.
At precisely seven minutes after the hour of Karambé Ascendant (the Thanetians measure time by the complex rhythms of their many moons) a beautiful woman—a virgin, I was [125] told—emerged from an inner room into the atrium.
There was a sweeping spiral staircase in the middle of the courtyard that seemed to lead nowhere. The staircase leaned; it ended on a tiny parapet that overlooked the ever-present sea. Well, the celebrants immediately fell into a trancelike state when the virgin entered, and they immediately began to whisper, over and over, like a mantra, the word thanopstru. Well, words are just air, but you cannot imagine how terrifying it is to hear this word whispered, in unison, by a hundred people, rhythmically, almost like zombies.
The chanting crescendoed; it was more than a whisper now, it was a thunder-roar, and the young woman mounted the parapet, and suddenly, maybe it was a break in the clouds in the night sky, maybe it was a moment preordained by their astronomers, but there appeared at the zenith of heaven this glowing, many-tailed star—a comet, I suppose—and the virgin leaped into the sea.
And then the chanting stopped, and there was silence for a very long time as everyone at the party drank an entire goblet of peftifesht—and another, and another—while I, an alien and a xenoanthropologist, eager to etch every moment of this bizarre ritual onto the clay tablets of my consciousness, did not drink, and [126] was perhaps the only halfway sober person in the entire courtyard.
Here’s the strangest part: I know the girl jumped. I saw her dive, heard the splash when she hit the waves. Yet an hour later, when I asked the other witnesses how they felt about the death of one so young, they denied the whole incident! Indeed, there was such a legend of a virgin suicide in their mythology. A beautiful story, they said, but it was of the past, not the present. And, they assured me, it was fiction, not fact.
The Thanetians live in a world that in their own minds is fleeting, illusory; they do not believe that the real is real. This is in conflict with the Federation which is, on the whole, materialistic; the spiritual is often kept to one side. So, for all I know, nobody saw a young woman leap to her death. For all I know, they all edited it out of their collective thoughts; we need to have this peftifesht analyzed; I will include a sample in my next physical reports package—assuming the planet is still here in a month.
I think I actually will down a goblet of that peftifesht before I start on the next chapter of these field notes.
“Computer,” said the captain, “what’s in the peftifesht?”
[127] “Water, mostly,” said the computer. “Water, simple carbohydrates, a few trace elements.”
“Nothing that would get anyone drunk,” Picard said, thinking of the vineyards of his childhood home—lost now, lost.
So even their native intoxicant worked by the magic of illusion, of autosuggestion. Culture was the primary imperative, not chemistry. The mind was master, not the world beyond.
He took a sip of the synthetic peftifesht. It was cool, a little cloying—and not intoxicating in the slightest.
Chapter Fifteen
To Save a World
“HE HAS SO MUCH to tell us,” Deanna said, back on the Enterprise. “I have to go back in. There has to be a way to save him.”
In the conference room, the atmosphere was serious. There was a profound conflict here; the Federation had standard rules for adjudicating such conflicts, yet these were sentient beings—a few million sentient beings—whose civilization and serf-image were at stake.
Picard had agreed to let the ambassador and his daughter sit in on the meeting. The hours, of course, were ticking away. It seemed only minutes ago that they still had two days to figure out what to do. Now it was down to a few hours. He had sent in technicians—he hadn’t dared risk sending Troi in again yet—and finally the ship’s doctor.
[130] “Dr. Crusher?” Picard turned to Beverly, who had just made a brief trip to the comet’s heart, and who now appeared somber and dejected.
She said, “I’ve analyzed the boy’s cell structure, the hard-wiring of his neurons to the silicon-based nervous system of the comet itself—and I’ve got to tell you, there’s no way to free him. His brain has been soldered into the computer that runs that infernal weapon. It’s appalling.”
Picard watched the ambassador, whose fists clenched and unclenched on the table. What he must be going through, he thought. It’s all unraveling—everything he ever held to be ultimate truth. “You’re saying that to remove the boy from the weapon would be—”
“To kill him, Captain,” said Dr. Crusher.
“And yet,” said the captain, “the needs of the many—” He was quoting the ancient adage that a great hero of the Federation had once uttered, giving his life for the life of his ship—all knew those words by heart, and all honored them.
“It’s true,” said Worf. “Yet honor demands that we exhaust all possibilities before allowing death to occur needlessly—”
Picard said, “Mr. La Forge?”
“Beverly is right, Captain,” La Forge said. “We can’t separate the boy from the comet without severing vital neural links. He’s part of that thing now, a cyborg as it were.”
Picard shuddered, remembering a time when he too had been joined to a great machine—a machine [131] intent on destroying all individuality, all true sentience in the entire galaxy.
“But we’d just be killing him,” said Counselor Troi, and Picard understood that she, of all the crew members, had actually felt what the comet felt, had been one with its emotions.
“As he would kill millions of others,” Picard said, with relentless logic.
“Captain, there’s a margin of safety still. An hour, half an hour—to find out what we need to know. We don’t know what world this comet is from or why the boy welded to the machine is so clearly Thanetian in species. We ought to know these things.”
Before we destroy him, Picard added silently. He winced. Perhaps the child’s death was inevitable, but he would be damned if he wouldn’t use every resource and every moment at his disposal to change the boy’s fate.
La Forge spoke up suddenly. “Captain, Commander Data is contacting us from the planet’s surface—just beneath the surface, actually.”
“On screen,” said the captain.
Data’s face formed where there had been a sea of stars. He was seated—no, enveloped—in a chair that seemed to be made of flesh, with tentacles writhing about his arms and feet. Behind him, other members of the Enterprise away team, as well as Dr. Halliday and his son, seemed similarly tethered to a wall. The room resembled an organic version of a control room in a starship.
[132] “Captain,” said Data, “the largest fauna on this world are not natural creatures at all. They are some kind of elaborately bioengineered cyborg, and they seem to contain records, racial memories, of Thanet’s history beyond the five thousand years the Thanetians have themselves recorded. It seems they have been expecting us—or someone, at any rate. This technology parallels the holodeck technology, except that the neurons fired are of living tissue rather than inorganic in origin.”
The bridge crew looked at their comrade on the screen, and then at each other, in wonder.
“Captain, I believe we are on the verge of understanding why this thanopstru has been launched to destroy Thanet. I am assimilating information as quickly as my positronic brain paths will permit. A few mor
e hours ought to illuminate everything. There seems to be—some kind of communication between the dailong and the comet—one is controlling the other—it is uncertain which. We are seeing the past right now. With astonishing verisimilitude. We were wrong about this world in many ways. It is not primitive at all. In fact, we are sensing the biography of the very life-form inside the comet now—and we are living through a simulacrum of its actual lifetime, five thousand years ago.”
“I knew nothing of this!” said the ambassador. “Does the High Shivantak perhaps know something we do not know? Is our entire culture—an artificial construct?”
[133] Suddenly the ambassador’s daughter spoke up. “Counselor, perhaps you will have need of—someone who understands the Thanetian language and culture. I think I should go with you. When I was younger, I trained with the dailongzhen of my community, hoping that I would one day catch and navigate a dailong myself—it’s the only way a Thanetian can ever transcend the limitations of caste. I don’t have much telepathic ability, but I could probably—help you with a few concepts.”
“The inner chamber is very cramped,” Picard said.
“This is our history you’re unearthing. One of us needs to be there. If we didn’t have a say in our past, and may not have one in our future,” Kio said with passion, “we should at least know what’s going on.”
Beverly Crusher said, “I could monitor her life signs remotely, and give the order to have her evacuated from on board the Enterprise.”
He could have said no. Maybe he should have. But if the girl’s own father, so overprotective when it came to an innocent romance, was willing to let her risk her life for knowledge, who was Picard to stand in the way?
“Make it so,” said Captain Picard, sighing.
Chapter Sixteen
Tanith
LANDFALL NOW. Not Thanet. Another world. The longship was pulling ashore next to a gilded pagoda guarded by ten-story demons of stone. They were docking—and Simon Tarses seemed to know what he was doing, Data observed, as he tugged at the ropes and made the sail fold up. The ancient technology was fascinating, mixed as it was with what seemed almost anachronistic, a sky busy with personal flying craft and larger rocket ships, and what looked like an artificial moon with blinking lights that spelled out commercial messages in an alien tongue which Data was already devoting a small part of his brain to deciphering.
